Cool Site of the Week: Down For Everyone Or Just Me

Since the dawn of the internet, a single question of black existentialist angst has haunted computer users: “Is this site down for everyone or is it just me?” To find an answer, You could reload the page, check that you’ve entered the URL correctly or try your luck with a different browser. Some might even go so far as to heckle their friends and co-workers into trying to open the URL on their computers. Wouldn’t you rather save yourself the time and energy of jumping through those hoops by simply visiting Down For Everyone Or Just Me? If any of us can get it to load up, it’ll be our Cool Site of the Week.

Down For Everyone Or Just Me is such an brilliant idea for a website, it’s a wonder that no one thought of it eons ago. In order to see whether a site is up and running or off, simply type its URL into the field provided and click the “or just me” link. Boom.

Down For Everyone Or Just Me will test the URL for you. For Opera, Firefox and Chrome users, an extension by the same name is also ready to test seemingly dead websites for you, but if you're working on a computer where installing add-ons isn’t an option, you’ll be glad the original web--based version is still there waiting for you to rely on.

Be sure to check back next Friday for another edition of Cool Site of the Week.

Cool site, awsome idea, but it's lacking one key feature.. it only checks whether it can access the site directly. the problem with that is that if you and the site share a common down gateway to the site in question and that gateway is down, it'll look down to both of you, but not to everyone else. It doesn't use a collection of requests or other tracking information to enhance results.

Also, it doesn't always work properly. For example, it constantly shows Amazom.com as being down, even though it's OK. Apparently, it sends a HEAD request to test the site, but several servers (including Amazon's infrastructure) reject such requests.